Signale - Activities

25 until 29 January 2020: We are on the Applied Machine Learning Days at the EPFL in Lausanne, where we present our framework "EventEpi" (natural language processing for the event based surveillance).

22 until 24 January 2020: We present progresses of the Topic Group Outbreaks at the Meeting H of the Focus Group AI for Health in Brasilia (locally and remotely).

16 until 17 January 2020: Kick-Off of the EJP One Health project "BeONE" at RIVM in Bilthoven, the Netherlands: One health approach for outbreak detection and visualization with epidemiological and genetic data for food-borne diseases.

8 and 9 January 2020: Workshop "AI4H standardized assessment framework & handling and assessment methods" at Fraunhofer HHI in Berlin, where we present Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as a solution for the generation of realistic, anonymized data.

18 December 2019: The article "A Bayesian Monte Carlo approach for predicting the spread of infectious diseases" is published in PLOS ONE.

17 December 2019: First conference calls within the Topic Group Outbreaks (15 participants from 12 countries in 7 time zones).

27 until 29 November 2019: We present EventEpi in a talk at ESCAIDE 2019 in Stockholm.

25 November 2019: We present our machine learning approaches on the workshop "Infectious Disease Surveillance" at the University of Bern. Thank you for the invitation!

21 November 2019: Great visit of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) in Tokyo, with exchanges on surveillance systems and automated outbreak detection. Thank you for your hospitality!

12 until 15 November 2019: We present progresses of the Topic Group Outbreaks at the Meeting G of the Focus Group AI for Health in New Delhi (remotely).

12 until 14 November 2019: Exciting EIOS Global Technical Meeting in Seoul, where we presented the supervised learning approach we developed for the detection of epidemiologically relevant online articles within the EIOS platform of the World Health Organization (WHO).

1 November 2019: Kristina Kohn (University of Kiel) starts her master project on dimensionality reduction, clustering and case-based outbreak detection.

11 until 13 September 2019: We present EventEpi in a talk at the 14th annual meeting of the German Society for Epidemiology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Epidemiologie, DGEpi) in Ulm, Germany.

1 July 2019: Birte Wagner (University of Bielefeld) starts her master project on the application of machine learning methods for the predictions of diagnoses and syndromes for improving syndromic surveillance using emergency department data.

11 until 21 June 2019: Savina Stoitsova of the National Center of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases (NCIPD) in Bulgaria visits us with the support of the "Senior Exchange" of ECDC.

29 May until 1 June 2019: We present our proposal for the benchmarking of outbreak detection algorithms to the Focus Group AI for Health during its Meeting E at ITU in Geneva. The Topic Group Outbreaks is created!

1 May until 31 October 2019: Stéphane Ghozzi is sent for six months to the World Health Organization (WHO). There he develops algorithms and tools for the investigation of outbreaks of unknown origin (team MDC) and the detection of epidemiologically relevant online articles on the EIOS platform (team DVA).

1 May 2019: Auss Abbood is now a member of the Signale team!

March 2019: For the ESEG project we visit the RESST team (syndromic surveillance) of Public Health England in Birmingham. Thanks for having us!

1 February 2019: Theresa Kocher joins us! Within the ESEG project, she will apply signal-detection algorithms to emergency-department data and develop a dashboard to communicate the results.

30 January and 1 February 2019: We present two works on the ISDS Conference 2019 in San Diego, California: "Supervised Learning for Automated Infectious-Disease-Outbreak Detection" and "Epidemiological Dashboards as a Strategy to Integrate Different Data Sources for a Wholistic Surveillance in Real Time". The slides can be found below at the end of this page.

21 January 2019: We present an introduction to automatic outbreak detection during the lecture series Infectious Disease Epidemiology at RKI. The slides can be found below at the end of this page.

1 December 2018: Knut Perseke joins us! He will work on web applications, dashboards and visualisations.

4 October 2018: The article Surveillance on speed: Being aware of infectious diseases in migrants mass accommodations - an easy and flexible toolkit for field application of syndromic surveillance, Germany, 2016 to 2017 is published in Eurosurveillance.

1 October 2018 and 1 November 2018: Auss Abbood and Rüdiger Busche (both: Institute of Cognitive Science of the Osnabrück University), who had participated in the hackathon "hack4health", come to do there master projects on the application of natural language processing for event based surveillance and the hyperparameter optimization of outbreak detection algorithms.

27 until 29 September 2018: Annual convention of the Arbeitskreis für Medizinische Geographie and Arbeitsgruppe Räumliche Statistik, Remagen
We are invited to present statistical methods and interactive dashboards.

12 until 14 September 2018: Visit at Santé publique France, Saint-Maurice
SpF and RKI discuss syndromic-surveillance systems, data analysis and data visualisation, data protection, and more. Thanks for the warm welcome!

4 July 2018: Visit at vfa about vaccination surveillance, Berlin
We present an interactive dashboard and analyses that explore the correlation of vaccination and incidence.

8 May 2018: The winning teams of the hackathon visit the RKI
The four teams that were distinguished as "winners" of the hackathon "hack4health" present their projects.

April and May 2018: Visit about time-space statistical modelling
Olivera Stojanović of the Institute of Cognitive Science of the Osnabrück University, who had participated in the hackathon "hack4health", visits us and further develops a statistical model that incorporates space-time dynamics of infectious diseases.

12 until 16 February 2018: Hackathon "hack4health" at the Osnabrück University
The hackathon "hack4health - Cognitive Computing Hackathon on Epidemiology" ran from 12 until 16 February at the Osnabrück University. Its goal was to apply modern methods of machine learning to classical problems of infectious-disease epidemiology.

Organisation, course and results of the hackathon are described in the report linked below (in German).

7 November 2017: ESCAIDE 2017, Stockholm
We present our Context Dashboard in a talk.

19 and 20 September 2017: Workshop "Automatic Outbreak Detection" at the RKI, Berlin
We invited 20 experts from all of Europe to discuss the present and future of automatic outbreak detection. It was structured in four sessions, each consisting of six short talks followed by discussions. The focus was data science (statistics and informatics): early-warning systems (comparison of different European countries); outbreak detection (algorithms); outbreak management (data integration); data visualisation (reports and dashboards).

More about the workshop can be found in the report linked at the end of this page (in German).

16 January 2017: Visit by the Institute of Cognitive Science of the Osnabrück University
ICS researchers present a project that aims at using social-media data to help detect influenza seasons earlier.

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